If your ripper did that. just don’t use that ripper
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These two recent conversations got me thinking about “Organised FUD”(*). The use of narratives to discredit legitimate compeditors.
When the Safe Network becomes successful it will attract powerful enemies with the financial incentive to discredit it and the access to push those narratives into the mainstream. The unfortunate inevitability of illegal content being hosted will be used to attack and discredit the Safe Networks purpose. The Freenet Project has long suffered this fate, even using their about page to try and defend the ideals of the project. The founder fled the US (in 2003!) out of fear for his safety from the authorities.
The Maidsafe foundation will come under fire with the same manner and methods. How to prepare for the negative media narrative to come? Setup a savvy media desk with experience discerning FUD from facts, bad self interested media actors serving narrative of little substance from the good? Methods to deliver consistent message on why the Safe Network is important and worth existing despite the few bad actors using it to host questionable content? Or just ignore it all and wing it… which may just lead to the same fate: Free-Net == child porn in the public consciousness. Hopefully there are lessons to be learned from those projects that have gone before.
(*) Think! Organised FUD series of posts investigating and exposing the methods and connections of some well known troll farms such as Bitfinexed, used to discredit legitimate operations.
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I’m not convinced that is the reason why Freenet hasn’t caught on. BitTorrent and Tor seem to have survived that mud slinging pretty well too.
Freenet has a number of limitations which SAFENetwork seeks to address, including incentives, private data, self healing, high anonymity, etc. We are all waiting to find out whether maidsafe achieves it.
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BitTorrent is not private in any way so probably does not count. Tor has a pretty active press department so perhaps that is partly how they keep their reputation in order. However there is increasing evidence that there are more powerful players protecting Tor’s status for national security and law enforcement reasons.
SAFENetwork being technically superior and successful may be reason for more unwanted negative press, not less.
MaidSafe is private, but the Safe Network won’t be, like BitTorrent (the protocol).
That’s one of the main points of this network.
Yes. To clarify: Bittorrent you can identify the servers storing the file parts, so law enforcement can and have coordinated take them down and arrest the participants of a child porn ring for example. SAFENetwork, Freenet Project and possibly Tor this is not so much an option, hence the bad press.
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Perhaps, but freenet being relatively weak technically feels like the larger driver to its lack of adoption.
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Such conspiracy! Next you’ll say it was a DARPA project…
Not really since the ISP doesn’t have a clue what you do on the SAFE network since everything is encrypted. There are no log files.
Sure, give users their happy space but this would still require tagging of content. But let’s think about this another way. How about a search engine. When you search for things sometimes you exclude results rather than include them. So you could simply set up a filter to automatically exclude certain results. However this still creates the same problem we have with content filter bubbles. If people only get the content they like then they don’t create a really democratic society and open discussion about reality. Kind of like Democrats and Republicans trying to have a conversation when all they get is their own propaganda in their facebook feed.
It should be noted there are countries that are fine with pedophilia. And what is considered terrorism is a very subjective thing. So the things you cited as “terrible” are very contemporary western values and quite subjective. On a planetary scale I don’t think everyone would agree. Which relates to the point of free speech. Not everyone is going to agree that pedophilia is wrong, or why. Not everyone is going to agree on what terrorism is or whether it’s wrong or justified. (For example cops pepperspraying college kids or tazering an autistic child could be described as terrorism.) Not everyone is going to agree on the definition of God(s), or how to worship. So everyone will have different perspectives. The idea that we will have some kind of universal consensus, presumably on western values, seems rather ludicrous. But that’s what free speech does. It gives everyone a voice, even those we totally disagree with. Free speech isn’t just about empowering those we like and support. It’s about giving EVERYONE a voice, equally.
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I’m all for no censorship, because the alternative is a scarier outcome. However, claiming, or at least insinuating, there is no moral objectivity in things like pedophilia or (certain kinds of) terrorism is utterly absurd. Just because other cultures treat it differently doesn’t mean it therefore becomes morally subjective. There is scientific proof how children being put into those kind of compromising situations is bad for their development and overall well being. I would say intentionally harming children to further one’s personal desires is pretty far over the line of morality. There are terrorists who murder otherwise innocent third parties in cold blood, for no reason other than intimidation and hate. I don’t see how murdering someone like a journalist, especially from a country you are not fighting in the first place, could be considered anything other than morally wrong.
Also, terrorism has a definition. A cop pepper spraying or tazering someone is objectively not terrorism. It is assault, (and potentially battery).
I don’t want to get into a political or philosophical debate here, I just find that viewpoint very strange.
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I think what @blindsite2k is getting at is that on a purely biological level sex is little different than eating or drinking. Physical and chemical interactions that result in a desired outcome. Rape and brutality are damaging in that the psyche naturally has to relinquish control which undermines the amygdalas’ function for survival.
Take those two away and what is left is perception. That which is provided by psycho-social input. Sex with any being in this context is merely a physical act. The psychological underpinnings are what shape the degree of destructiveness of the event. No psychological damage to the participants can of sexual act that is not perceived as wrong.
Terrorizing symbiotic beings is a reductive action. Crippling one to enable the other where no need be. Terrorism driven by ideological beliefs are where the subjectivity arguments spawn.
Honestly I would have a porn/gore filter on by default in the safe browser, so users can deactivate it in advanced options or so, I would make it a little bit difficult so kids, nuns and non techy conservative people don’t have to deal with undesired content.
Illegal content is more ambiguous and more subjetive…
I think in the future there will be many different filters suited to different ideologies.
I don’t expect safe network to change the way humans try to stay inside the comfort zone, as long as it provides liberty of expression and privacy its enough.
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I associate objectivity more with science or journalism. Apparently ‘moral objectivity’ is an existing term, but I find the synonym moral universalism less confusing. From the Wikipedia page:
According to philosophy professor R. W. Hepburn: “To move towards the objectivist pole is to argue that moral judgements can be rationally defensible, true or false, that there are rational procedural tests for identifying morally impermissible actions, or that moral values exist independently of the feeling-states of individuals at particular times.”
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The Non-aggression Principle is about the closest we can get to a universal code to build on, imo; few would be keen to aggress against others, should it result it equal and opposite aggression against themselves. Applying the NAP may not be straightforward nor sufficient for many people, but it feels like a sound foundation to build upon.
Applying the NAP to SAFENetwork is much like applying it to any tool - the tool in itself does no harm, but the individual who uses the tool certainly can.
The NAP also brings into question institutions which rely on maintaining an imbalance of power in their favour. That is part of a much bigger discussion though! 
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The people of non-western countries, and even some western ones - who are imprisoned or worse for engaging in censored forms of communication might differ with you on whether there’s “no such thing as illegal.”
Censorship means the criminalization - making illegal - of some form of communication. Any system designed to evade censorship has to evade censorship - that is, it must evade enforcement of laws - including consequences such as imprisonment or more - regarding the criminalized form of communication. If the network is susceptible to enforcement of censorship for elective pursuits - however trivial or odious - then it is also susceptible to enforcement of censorship for people speaking out about their oppressors or oppression.
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Yes, we need many sorts of decentralized self-governance systems, and yes, this and related questions deserve their own topics. It’s huge discussion. 
Hmmm, let’s see… Afganistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria, Yemen, etc. And tomorrow we in the US are supposed to honor these “defenders of freedom” and these same perpetrators of crimes against humanity as heroes. I guess it’s all a matter of perspective. These acts of terrorism are easier to ignore and justify when you are not an innocent civilian on the recieving end of a Hellfire missile. And this is done on a scale that most “terrorists” can only dream of.
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I made no defense of the US foreign policy. I’m not a huge fan of most of it. However, there is still a fundamental difference between what the US does, and what someone like ISIS does. The US targets enemy combatants. It is unfortunate the enemy chooses to surround itself with innocent civilians, but the civilians are not the target. They are collateral damage. Now, whether or not that is moral is certainly up for debate.
However, when you compare that to ISIS, who makes a conscious choice to kill an innocent civilian with no strategic goal, often doing it in torturous, awful ways,that is called murder in every sense of the word.
Stories out of Syria talk of a mother who had to watch her four year old child get beheaded, and then was made to wash her hands in her child’s blood. That is straight evil.
This topic will end up in #off-topic if the political talk continues. Don’t want this to end up a political discussion. Some will occur but this has the potential to be a heated debate on political grounds.
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